My Life is a Miracle

11 The Healin Bresles, France, a stone’s throw from the city of Beauvais. Among the daughters of Saint Francis of Assisi it is called a “fraternity” rather than a convent. It’s a simple house, but always open and welcoming. The return journey was totally exhausting. Twelve hours in that “white train”—that’s its name, but it really ought to be called “the train that takes its sweet time.” It toddles along the train tracks of France, its cars filled with the sick, stopping at all the stations, politely shunting into a siding to let the other high-speed trains go by, trains full of people in a hurry, healthy people. They shoot past with- out giving us a look. Their passing by makes our poor old train quake, but it doesn’t complain. That’s always the way. That’s life. I was traveling in “ambulance” 12, as the cars are called. Anne, a volunteer pharmacist, looked after us in our sleeping compartments. Somehow I had managed to lift myself up in the narrow upper bunk I’d been assigned— an acrobatic feat when you’re in a brace. I’m wedged into this bed in my corset: that two- faced friend has become my rigid second skin, my companion in misfortune without which I wouldn’t be able to stand up. It protects me, a little, from the continuous shocks of the rail- road tracks. Fortunately, the morphine eases the